It’s important for composers to confront the use of computers face-on; even empirically, at a basic level. To search for, study, and promote new means through which to communicate with them, new interfaces. It’s important for them to help to lead mankind back to the centre of his machines.
In 1990 Francesconi founded AGON with two great utopian visions in mind. The first was that it is still possible and desperately important to work together, cooperatively, imagining projects to realise together with others, to exchange experiences, ideas. AGON came into being as an organism with a public identity: “it is not my or your studio”; it aspires to be a place where it’s possible to talk, meet, and not just pursue one’s own interest. The second utopian idea was to start from below and not from high-tech; to depart from the musical needs of composers with a view to stimulating a different relationship, simpler, “less terroristic”, between real musicians and machines. Handling electronics also serves, according to Francesconi, to recuperate a physical, auditive approach to musical composition, which, if limited to paper and pencil, runs the risk of becoming too speculative, weakening the direct relationship with the sonoric material. AGON has for many years been one of the most active centres in Italy for music research and production.